REDEMPTION

AGAIN

It was the silence that she couldn’t get over.

Every time Daphie walked down the three shallow grey carpeted steps into the library, the silence met her there. It didn’t matter how many people were in the library or how loudly they were whispering or giggling. One time Daphie had gone into the library, on purpose, when she knew there was going to be an assembly for the fourteens, with a speaker and microphones and as much overstimulation as the librarians could make their outdated digitovisual system produce. Daphie could hear, with perfect and mocking clarity, the speaker’s amplified voice, the gossip and commentary rippling among the students, the bells and beeps and whistles accompanying the graphics that burst across the videoscreen. But somehow, impossibly, the silence was still there.

And once the silence met her, it began again. Every single time.

No matter what entrance she used it was always the same. The heavy dark table in the corner by the contemporary fiction section leapt grotesquely from its place and suddenly it was huge, stretched flat and hard above her head, boxing her vision into a long narrow square slashed in two places by its straight brown legs. Daphie was crouched under it again, unable now to feel the sickness turning in her stomach or the terror shaking her weakening arms. She could not hear the pounding footsteps or the shouts or the strangely insignificant snap, snap, snap of the gunshots. When something fell heavily into the box of gray carpet and pallid light that she could see from underneath the table, she could not hear it drop. She could not hear the wetness puddling in Kerin’s throat as she screamed through her own blood.

The silence crushed all of these things. The picture unrolled exactly as it had the time before and the time before that. She saw her white hands tremble at the bottom of her field of vision and knew she was dragging herself forward. Toward the terrified cries she could not hear, toward the spattered pale hands that twisted on the darkening carpet, toward the girl who was trying to push herself to her hands and knees, toward the stain spreading swiftly around her.

The table disappeared, and Daphie knew, rather than felt, what was happening to her. Saw, rather than felt, her own hand clasping Kerin’s. Remembered, but could not feel, the terrible weight of Kerin’s fallen body. And then her own sinking realization that she could not drag Kerin back under that table, that she could never drag the table to where they were. Feeling bled back into the memory, and once again she knew that there was no safety anywhere. All there was to do, now, was lean forward awkwardly and wrap herself around Kerin’s shivering body, as in her mind the idiotic thought repeated itself. It’s wet, she’s soaked, blood is as wet as water.

And, because the silence would not allow her the smallest act of resistance or refusal, she would look up and see Jarad standing behind the railing overlooking the reading room. Her eyes would attach themselves to his face so that she could barely see the hollow metal snout of the rifle. And her words ran themselves over again, God, stop him, don’t let him kill me, save me.

At the end, the silence burned, welding vision to memory in one white-hot seam, and she was there, again, as the silence filled the empty universe until there was nothing left but Jarad’s white face and those dead gray eyes, and she knew. There is no God, and nothing will save me.

And then, to punish her, God saved her anyway.

* * * * *

“You can’t talk to me that way! You’re not my mother!”

Sonnia knew before she said it how stupid it would sound, but she couldn’t stop herself.

For a moment, Aine’s head drew back, and her brows moved together in bafflement.

“Well, thank Idair for that,” Aine finally returned, in a voice that had not become one bit less angry. “And you ought to thank Idair I’m not my mother, either, because she would have started spanking you ten minutes ago.”

“I don’t have to take this tarbhfnaa from you,” Sonnia muttered, shoving past Aine toward the narrow staircase.

The boards they had used for the steps were thin and warped by the salt air. Sonnia had to go slowly or risk taking an undignified spill. But she was out the door and halfway down the path before she noticed that Aine hadn’t followed her.

The wind that always blew in from the water lashed her face, leaving tears in the corners of her eyes. She fought through it toward the rocks at the edge of the island.

The tide had gone out; the basalt outcroppings that surrounded the narrow sandy beach had emerged from the ocean, and their beards of dripping seaweed shivered in the wind. Sand rasped under her feet, but it was less than a minute before her heels were thudding in wet clay that had been exposed by the tide, and no time at all before she had to stop running. The rocks were wet, the seaweed was slippery, and if she slipped and cracked her head open and fell into the water it might be hours before Aine got over being mad and came out to look for her.

Sonnia stooped to pick up a handful of loose stones. One by one, she began hurling them at the ocean.

“Idiot!” she shouted, as the first one left her hand. “What is wrong with you?”

The second stone broke the gray-green surface of an incoming wave and disappeared. It had no answer for her.

The third stone went a little farther than the second. “Why—are—you—always—thurking—up—like—this?”

She was out of stones. She reached down for another handful.

Wrong. The stones were saying it on their own now, as they crashed into the water. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wherever she went and whatever she did.

No matter how hard she threw, she’d never hit the border. Aine had told her it was a hundred miles off, too far to be seen except on a very cloudy day, and even then it was hard to tell that gray ghost of a curtain from the rain that fell in sheets four days out of five. It was now the so-called hot season, and on this rock in the ocean the wind was still carrying the damp and the cold right into her bones. She drew her arm back viciously, as if she could send her anger out to puncture the border along with the stone. It was the kind of thing she ought to be able to do by now, if she was any good.

The stone skidded sideways out of her hand, landing flat, hopping over the wind-ruffled surface of the water until it touched down again. And again, and again, and again, until it disappeared at the end of its string of footprints.

Sonnia stared at the circles wavering on the surface. A subtle shift in the light silvered the graying waves, and for a moment she forgot what had brought her out there.

* * * * *

Kwenu lifted her head.

It was hard to say at first. But there it was. Down at the end of the long curved corridor, the sickening gulp of air as the lockdown door opened. And then the unmistakable tread of several pairs of heavy-soled, steel-tipped boots.

Correctors coming. Cell search.

Her eyes darted to the floor of her cell and the long white ribbon unrolled over the brown and white tiles. She had covered most of it in that tiny cramped handwriting she had learned through necessity. To lose all that work. It was enough to break your heart if you still had one.

She had less than a minute. After that the Correctors would be there, and they would grind her face into the cold porcelain and iron floor, again, and wrench her arms into manacles, again, while they searched the cell and confiscated everything that Kwenu hadn’t already concealed somewhere on, or in, her body.

There was the message, the pen, the palmweb, the carefully saved pile of plastic scraps, the protector.

“Get your thurking hands off me! Leave me the thurking hell alone!”

Emme always made as much noise as possible the instant they got her cell open, to let everyone know how long they had. Because the cells were laid out along a semicircular corridor, nobody but Emme could actually see the door when it opened. Since Emme never had much warning, she was not allowed to keep anything important.

The boots were getting closer.

The message, the pen, the plastic, the protector.

There was no way she could save it all.

She tore the message off, put the roll of toilet paper back on the spool above the commode, and rolled the message into a tiny white pellet. If she got the plastic on it fast enough she could at least save that.

Almost here.

Kwenu covered the message in a scrap of plastic and tucked it into a corner of her mouth. She balled up the rest of the plastic, threw it into the toilet, and flushed. They’d see the water swirling when they got there. Probably they’d go down the pipe in hopes of recovering something. Serve them right when all they found was her fnaa.

Through the bars she could see the rust-red uniforms of the correctors. The one on the left was a Naralan named Pacheca. Pacheca normally worked the day shift, and up to this point, she had still been partly human. The hulking, pig-eyed Corrector next to her, Bildun, must have been found on a grassy plain somewhere, running with a family of wild boars.

“Kwenu Umuo, stand for cell search,” Bildun barked.

Kwenu turned back from the toilet. She folded her legs and sat down, staring silently through the bars.

Bildun turned to Pacheca, who watched Kwenu with dark and, she thought, unsettled eyes.

“Hope you’re ready for some ugly,” Bildun said.

Kwenu locked her arms around her knees. The message sat under her tongue, swimming in a warm bubble of saliva. One thing saved, anyway.

* * * * *

Aine wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her hreapa, then watched the tears roll off to spatter the still-wet blackish-green ink scrawled across the pages of the naming book.

She dropped into the wattle-and-seagrass chair she had made for Sonnia’s room, and threw the book onto the plank that served as a desktop. Then she took a deep breath, folded her hands, and opened the link.

<Aine?>

<It’s me, dhiaoc. Am I interrupting?>

There was a pause. Aine began to get nervous.

<No, Aine, Istri’s not back from siuilin yet. What’s up?>

<Well…well, bleed through, I’ll show you.>

Aine felt the link deepen. She couldn’t hear Theamh sigh, but she could swear she felt it.

<She’s really done it this time,> Theamh said. <What possessed her?>

The tears threatened to start again as she thought about it.

In spite of everything Aine smiled. Theamh could complain about that for as long as she wanted, but Aine knew well enough that she really did like it. Theamh didn’t know that; but there were a lot of things that Theamh didn’t know about herself.

There was a pause, while Theamh read the words that Sonnia had scribbled over the first two pages.

<It’s poor enough stuff,> Theamh finally said. <You’d think the transcription of someone’s innermost thoughts and secrets would be more interesting.>

<Supposedly. They’re big up north, Istria says.>

<Istria?>

<I’ve got her on another link, and it’s lucky for you, because unlike me she has an idea.>

Aine sat up, startled.

<But…well, I’ve never seen a dark user’s spell, but I doubt that Sonnia-- >

<Exactly. Lighten the touch as much as you can. It’s not going to take a whole lot of magic to undo a mess of bitching about how rotten Jiprani weather is and how much she misses Cretid plumbing.>

<But…if I overdo and the names start unraveling…>

<One, I doubt you will, and two, they’re not the real names, Aine. The used names are connected to the real names and if you undid them all it would be too bad, but I don’t think it would do the children any permanent harm.>

Aine thought about it, and decided it would probably work out all right.

<That’s what I’ll do then, dhiaoc. Thanks.>

Yes, she did know that. Aine had worked very hard to stop herself from calling Theamh on a daily basis when she first began her practice. Aine knew that Theamh would never tell her to just shut up and deal with it, just as Aine knew that she would have been happy to let Theamh go on being her dhiaoc forever. But this was her job and it was her duty to try to do it on her own, and in the end what happened was that weeks would go by without a word passing between them, just because Aine was trying so hard not to be a pest.

<And how are things in your practice?> Aine asked, reluctant to let her go now that she had the link open.

<Boring as hell and I love every minute of it,> Theamh said. <Ever since we homeswept Second of Three it’s been pretty quiet around here.>

It was like Theamh to tuck a horrible thing like that into a dependent clause, but Aine knew better than to be fooled by it.

<You deserve some peace and quiet,> Aine said.

Aine sighed heavily.

<Well, I think you’re in the clear by now, anyway,> Theamh said. <You’ve certainly tried.>

Aine looked at the black loops trailing across the page.

Sonnia’s writing was an irregular scribble that slipped along crazy diagonals and was studded with blots where the pen had protested her mishandling. It was a lucky thing Sonnia was not more skillful with a quill; she would have done far more damage.

<Well, good luck with it, Aine. Let me know if you need help.>

<Thanks, Theamh. Idair with you.>

Theamh closed the link.

Aine turned the pages over until she came to the first blank one.

<Sonnia.>

No response. As usual.

Aine took the book down to the kitchen. Sonnia would be back soon enough. It was a small island, and Sonnia didn’t know how to sail.

* * * * *

Chandra hated just about everything about the Ruthlin Redemption Facility. But she had to admit that the entrance hall was a real piece of work.

She craned her neck to look past the floodlights up to the ceiling. Ribs of iron, scrolled at the edges with spade-shaped points that were both decorative and defensive, traced the seams outlining the vaults above. Where the curved sides of the vaults met the tops of the walls, the pattern was repeated in a dark trim that might be metal or might be wood painted to look like metal. Ranged in ranks along the trim, lamps thrust everything below them into brutal halogen light, but the vaults reached away into dimness and obscurity.

She didn’t know who had been responsible for designating this place, amongst all the prisons springing up like mushrooms from the rotting soil of her country, for the political prisoners. Not that this had ever happened, officially. Officially, there were no political prisoners. Officially, everyone in this building was an ordinary penitent, there to repent and repay his or her criminal violations of law and order. Officially, the fact that all of the penitents in this particular facility had been charged with or convicted of contributing to the Terror was purely a coincidence.

Well, perhaps it was. Chandra couldn’t think of any rational explanation for the archaic grandeur of Ruthlin’s entrance hall, or the fact that what her country’s government considered the most dangerous offenders in the Nation were incarcerated in its oldest surviving prison. It was true that nobody had yet managed to break out of the place. Maybe someone high up in the system was superstitious, and trusted that Ruthlin’s luck would hold. Or maybe, having learned to mistrust technologies that had been turned against them, her nation’s leaders were reverting to the basics: stone and iron, chains and padlocks.

As she walked behind the guard toward the visitors’ room, she could see evidence of frequent updates—multiple sets of wires running along the ironwork and across the flagstones for multiple sets of cameras, motion detectors, automated controls. The Corrector unbolted a green metal door. It swung inward into a whitewashed anteroom lined with scarred wooden benches. The waiting room was empty today. Most of the people who would have been there with her worked more than one job, and had to visit their friends, lovers, or relatives on the weekends or not at all. Chandra had at one time been working four jobs. But then the assets available to the publishers of Changing Times had been frozen pending the outcome of a Bureau investigation, Third Term Triumphant had folded, and Bread on the Waters went bankrupt. The Council for the Protection of People of Color did not pay much, but at least the organization was still viable, and Chandra came a lot cheaper than a real lawyer.

The door from the anteroom to the visiting center was shining stainless steel; it slid noiselessly into the wall. How they had accomplished that, in a pile like this, Chandra was never going to know.

“Half an hour,” said the Corrector.

Chandra lifted her satchel in one hand and followed her in.

She had been searched on her way in and would be searched again on her way out. This once, it was a worthless precaution; she wasn’t meeting Kwenu. She was doing her job, the only one she had left. As the least valuable member of the CPPC team, it fell to her to handle the lost causes.

Her client sat on the other side of a plexiglass barrier that divided the room. It created the appearance of a hermetic seal, but in fact it was an exercise in futility. There were dozens of ways to smuggle things into and out of a prison, and Chandra knew about most of them.

“Hello,” Chandra said. “I’m Chandra Delpan, I’m with the CPPC.”

The woman behind the plexiglass nodded. Like all the inmates, she wore an acid-green jumpsuit, zipped up to the neck but rolled up at the sleeves. Some underpaid prison employee had given her black hair a buzz cut that might have worked in the dark in a queer nightclub, but which was highly unflattering in the harsh light of the visitors’ room. Like all of them, she looked battered, beaten somehow from flesh into stone. Unlike most of them, she was very pale, even allowing for the lights. The CPPC was not supposed to represent white people; but white as they were, Ideirens came under the general heading of oppressed minorities. Hordes of them had been interned in Marshlands, and several were locked up in Ruthlin, and there was no one else in the city willing to help them.

“I’m not licensed to practice law in the Nation.” Chandra began the speech as she fished the file out of her satchel. “I’m not empowered to decide whether the CPPC will represent you. All I can do is interview you, get as much information as I can and bring it back to the office. We all understand the urgency, but our staff lawyers are very busy right now, and we cannot represent everyone.”

By “staff lawyers,” Chandra meant Treviene. She was the only lawyer employed by the CPPC who was not currently incarcerated. She was also the only lawyer employed by the CPPC who was not a person of color.

“I understand,” said the woman behind the plexiglass.

“Let me just review your file before we get started…” Review, or as the case might be, read. For someone who was essentially unemployed, Chandra had become a very busy woman since she returned to the Nation.

Chandra thought she heard her client trying to suppress a sigh of annoyance. She kept her eyes focused on the folder, rooting through the internal memos and second copies of official forms on her way to the basic fact sheet. This woman had been charged under the ever-popular Code Restraining Egregious Terrorist Insurrection and Destruction Act, whose idiotic name was matched in absurdity only by the actual language of the statute. Even better, the Secrecy Commission had intervened, blocking the release of any information about her closed-door trial. All Chandra could really tell about her client from the sadly brief summary worked up by the unpaid intern who answered the phone was that she had entered the country illegally a few years earlier, then gone back to Ideire only to be extradited and sentenced to death for capital crimes against the Nation—which, given the scope and vagueness of the C.R.E.T.I.D. Act, could mean just about anything.

“So, Ms. Nalv—”

“I don’t answer to that,” said the woman behind the plexiglass.

“I’m sorry,” Chandra said, remembering too late that official forms could never cope with Ideiren names. Nalv must be the matronym or the line name. She went back to the sheet to find the used name. For the first time she saw that under the legal name there were two alternates listed. Iolys Nalv, alias Lily Devane, alias…

Chandra’s head snapped up. The blue eyes of the woman on the other side of the plexiglass met hers without blinking.

“Oh no,” Chandra breathed.

“Oh, absolutely,” said the woman behind the plexiglass.

Her voice was sharp, but it sounded pleased, as if Chandra’s revulsion and terror amused her.

“So,” her client finally said, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in her chair. “Ask me your questions.”

Chandra pushed her chair further back.

Lythril exhaled in exasperation. “If I wanted your mind I would have it already. I don’t have to overtake you. You’re going to work for me anyway. A life is a life.”

She thought it again for the ten thousandth time. I should never have come back up here.

“No,” said Lythril. “But you have. So ask me your questions.”

Chandra bent down to scoop together the different pieces of the file, which were scattered around her chair. And then, because a life was a life, she took out the intake form.

* * * * *

The house looked empty when Sonnia finally opened the door.

“Hello?”

Except for the faint hum of the waves filtered through the doorway, it was silent.

Sonnia latched the door and decided Aine might be in the kitchen.

In fact, as soon as she reached the doorway she could see Aine’s head bent over the pine boards of the table. A book lay open in front of her. One of Aine’s hands traveled slowly over the page, backwards.

“I brought you back some seaweed,” Sonnia said, tentatively. “I put it in the press.”

Aine’s head nodded. Her fingers traced the page, right to left, bottom to top. Sonnia thought she could see a faint yellow glow outlining the tips of her fingers, but she couldn’t be sure.

She flopped into the other chair, looking across the table at the open book. Even upside down she could recognize the opening words of her journal. Under Aine’s glowing hand, they were coming undone.

Sonnia knew Aine was right and she was wrong. The book was Aine’s, not hers, and she’d seen Aine write the names in it after she put them on the babies. But the thing was blank, all the same. It was the only paper in the house apart from a bunch of rolled-up scrolls that even a thurk-up like herself would know better than to mess with, and she was so thurking bored. Anyway that was her writing, and Aine didn’t seem to have any problem at all with wiping it off like it couldn’t possibly be worth anything.

She watched the last words disappear. The book was blank again.

Aine brushed a hand across the surface of the first page.

Little pale flames followed her hand, trailing in curlicues and squiggles.

Aine heaved an enormous sigh. She leaned forward, briefly, hanging over the book, and then brushed the page with her hand again, until the book was empty.

From the green in her eyes when Aine finally looked up, it didn’t seem like she was angry any more. Sonnia was still bad at reading, but she thought maybe it was that Aine was sad, instead.

“I’m sorry,” Sonnia said, trying to mean it.

Aine put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. When she did that, she looked young again, almost like she could be in a secondary school back home watching a teacher go through some boring lesson.

“Come with me,” Aine said, closing the book. “We need to talk.”

Aine stood, tucking the book under one arm. Sonnia didn’t know why they couldn’t talk in the kitchen, but she wasn’t inclined to push her luck.

There weren’t too many places they could go. On the ground floor, there were the kitchen and the living area. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms. No basement, because of the rocks under the thin soil. Instead, there was a shed out back. That was where Aine seemed to be heading, after she pushed through the door and into the wind.

Sonnia followed, remembering to turn around and latch the door instead of letting it bang. She wondered if Aine was taking her out to give her a good hiding. That was the kind of thing Ideirens were always wanting to do to people like her. Or at least so she imagined.

But instead Aine walked toward a round hut made of wattles and mud, detached from the house but still sheltering in its lea.

The hut had no windows, and only one door, a low rounded opening that Sonnia had to duck to get through. She thought of it as one of those toadstool houses they had in the children’s books back home, the ones the elves lived in. Except these elves were not much like the ones in the books.

It was like a movie, only if you were in the movie—up on the screen instead of watching from the seats. Hanging back by the doorway, Sonnia could see colored light swirling around Aine, who had walked into the center of the room. Aine called out their names, which like all Ideiren names were long strings of nonsense that Sonnia couldn’t keep in her head. The colors began to separate, each streaming over to one of the four boulders placed near the wall of the hut.

Sonnia had seen them before, whenever Aine had to use them to exorcise someone. But when they worked for Aine outdoors, they looked like one big mess of lightning. Now, Sonnia could see one shimmering against the whitewashed wall, cascading in streams of silvery greenish gray like the waves against the island. More light, this time the color of red wine, pulsed deep and purple around the boulder on the other side of the hut. Aine faced the third boulder, where a ball of light hovered, very pale blue but studded all over with conical points. There didn’t seem to be anything near the fourth boulder.

There was a squeak from Aine. She toppled abruptly backward onto the hard earth floor of the hut.

Fire arched and forked all over Aine’s body, in sharp, yellowy-green streaks that wound around her hands and feet and tumbled her back onto the floor every time she got up. Sonnia looked on as the fire rolled Aine in the dirt again, trying to figure out whether Aine was calling for help or telling her what to do or what.

Aine got into a crouch, on her hands and knees, her hair hanging into her face. Through the yellow-green light Sonnia could see her face. Aine was laughing.

“All right, that’s enough now,” Aine said, to nothing in particular.

Aine shook her whole body, like a dog coming out of the water. Yellow-green flew off in shooting bright droplets. Before Sonnia could blink again, Aine was on her feet, perfectly calm and collected, brushing her hair down with one hand. Above the empty boulder, a bubbling yellow-green shape bounced up and down, still excited.

“It used to scare the daylights out of me when he did that,” Aine said, to Sonnia’s questioning stare. “But now I understand it’s just rough-housing. Like with my brothers.”

“Uh huh,” Sonnia said, moving her eyes from one flash-bulb bright bodiless energy-type being to the next.

“You still don’t know their names, do you?” Aine said.

Sonnia shook her head.

“That’s Kliphrys,” Aine said, nodding at the yellow-green bouncing form. “I used to think he was still testing me but really he’s just playful. And the sea-green one is Tionabhan. Calehu is star-shaped. And then there’s Linbrith.”

Aine was looking at the wine-colored one. Sonnia thought Aine seemed sad, but she couldn’t be sure why.

“Say the names again,” Aine said, talking to Sonnia but not looking at her.

Suppressing a sigh, Sonnia said, “Clifrus, Teenuwan, Collohue, Linbrith.”

“Close enough,” Aine answered. She was still looking at the wine-colored one.

“Linbrith is different from the others,” Aine said.

“She’s darker,” Sonnia suggested.

“No,” Aine replied. “She’s a stronger color, but she’s just as bright as the others. What’s different is that she’s…well, she’s someone else’s vigil, or she used to be someone else’s, anyway, before I found her.”

Aine finally turned to face Sonnia, and now Sonnia knew she was sad.

“Did you ever meet Kelah? Yes, you must have.”

Sonnia shrugged. Then, as a memory came back to her, “Wait…she was the crabby one, right?”

She had expected Aine to keep going with her story. But instead, Aine just looked at her, until Sonnia started to think maybe she had done something wrong, again.

“There’s a lot I didn’t understand about vigils before I found mine,” Aine finally said. “They teach you a lot about who you are. But they also—you can find out a lot about other people, through them.”

So this was all some kind of a test. Which Sonnia must have failed, as usual.

Sonnia crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the wall.

“I noticed it the first time I had to use them around you,” Aine said. “You don’t—you don’t seem to have any natural fear of them. Which could mean that you could turn out to be a great shriia, in the end.”

Sonnia was sure that there was a ‘but’ coming.

“But then while I was undoing the book, this afternoon,” Aine said.

Sonnia dropped her eyes.

“I’ve been wondering all day why you would do a thing like that. There’s plenty you don’t understand, and that’s just the way it is and nothing you can do anything about. But this isn’t complicated. It’s a book where I write down the used names of new children. You’ve gone out with me plenty of times to see me do it. You know what it is and you know how important it is and you took it anyway and wrote all over it.”

“It was blank!” Sonnia burst out.

“It is not blank, Sonnia. You can’t see the names but that does not mean they’re not there.”

“But—”

“I was undoing the words and I thought, this isn’t your journal. You weren’t keeping it for you. It’s a message for me because sooner or later I was bound to name another baby and then I would find it. And then I tried to figure out what the message was saying and I think maybe I have it.”

“So what is it, then?”

Sonnia knew her voice sounded surly, challenging. But she really did want to know the answer.

“Two things,” Aine said. “One is that you don’t believe in magic.”

Sonnia let out a noise of protest. “That’s ridiculous. I see you—”

“You see me use magic all the time but that doesn’t mean you believe in it. I mean I know you believe in it with your head, but there’s something—you don’t—there’s something—here—” The fingers of Aine’s right hand tapped repeatedly against the part of her hreapa that covered her heart. “Something here is just not letting you—well—not letting you get it, Sonnia.”

Aine’s hand flew into the air as she sighed in frustration.

“I’m sorry, I wish I could explain it better than that.”

“I wish so too,” Sonnia muttered.

“What I mean is…”

She shouldn’t have said anything; now Aine was trying to elaborate. They might never be done.

“All right, the uisce is invisible when it dries and you can only see the letters when I bring the fire out. But you’ve seen me write them and you know they’re there. So why would you write over them unless it was to show me that you don’t believe that they really mean anything?”

Sonnia didn’t think she understood what Aine was talking about, but at the same time, she was starting to feel a strange sense of relief.

“So the second thing,” Sonnia said, grudgingly.

“The second thing.” Aine’s voice was softer now, and suddenly the green in her eyes was greyer, as if the mist from the sea was drifting over them.

“The second thing is that you want to go home.”

Sonnia felt her throat constricting, and tears coming to her eyes.

“I don’t want to go home!”

“You don’t want to go back to your father,” Aine said gently. “It’s not the same thing.”

The muscles around Sonnia’s mouth began quivering. She tried to control it but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of anything to say, except maybe “Go to hell,” and she didn’t feel like saying that.

“For six years of my life I was homesick every single day,” Aine said, as one hand came into the air and hovered there, uncertain. “It isn’t the same for you, you weren’t happy at home—but you’re not happy here either.”

Sonnia didn’t want to be crying, but she was; and worse, she was nodding. Aine leapt on this slight encouragement.

“It’s not your fault, Sonnia,” Aine said, and it sounded as if Aine was just as unhappy as she was. “It doesn’t mean—that you can’t live here, that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you.”

“Yes it does!”

Sonnia’s knees bent and she slid down until she was sitting with her back to the plastered wall. Sonnia closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with both hands, but the tears kept coming. From a change in shadows she knew that Aine was sitting next to her. Aine’s arm rested along her shoulders, well-meaning, awkward.

“It doesn’t,” Aine insisted. “You think it’s because you’re not learning fast enough but that isn’t it. You can send, and you can sort of receive, and you can almost tell when I call you over the link. That’s a lot for a Cr—for someone who was never raised here. You’re doing pretty well. It’s just that you’re not happy, because you don’t really want to be here.”

Sonnia gave vent to a fresh burst of tears. Aine waited, with that maddening patience, for her to be done.

“I can’t go back to my family!” Sonnia finally shouted.

“Not your father,” Aine said. “But what about Ustine?”

Sonnia looked around for a tissue, and ended up wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“Going back to her means going back to him.”

Aine waited for a minute before she answered.

“What if you were to ask her?” Aine said. “What if you said, look, I’ll come back and live with you, but you have to leave my father?”

Sonnia shook her head. “She’d never do it.”

Maybe Aine was reading everything that was flying into Sonnia’s head about divorce, because she didn’t argue.

“What if you asked her to compromise? Get her own house or apartment or something, and she could be with you there, and then she could go be with him when she wanted to.”

Sonnia still couldn’t see it happening. But it didn’t sound as crazy as she had expected.

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Supposing we asked,” Aine answered. “Supposing we made her an offer. Sometimes if you make the first move, you can choose your own terms.”

The tears had almost cleared out of her eyes, and now Aine’s face was clear again, earnest and solemn and trying, really trying, to help, after all the fnaa Sonnia had pulled on her.

“She wouldn’t take it.”

“But supposing we asked.”

Sonnia thought for a minute.

“How would you ask her?”

“I’ll talk to the Council. They can get a message to our ambassador up there, he would start the negotiations.”

It was starting to seem to Sonnia as if Aine had spent a lot of time thinking about this, and perhaps consulted one or two other people, probably the same two people who had gotten her all excited about this magic thing in the first place and then gone off to the middle of Amst together and forgotten all about her.

“Are you saying this because you want to get rid of me?” Sonnia said.

She had meant it to come out angry, but instead she just sounded tired.

“No,” Aine answered, quietly, as if she had expected the question. “You have been a lot of trouble. But if I thought that you really wanted to learn shri and live here, I would keep trying to teach you.” One of Aine’s hands reached over to where Sonnia’s were lying in her lap and patted them gently. “I don’t think you really want to do either. That’s why I’m saying this.”

Sonnia looked at Aine’s hand. The skin wasn’t scorched, or thickened, or hot. It didn’t look too different from Sonnia’s own hands, now that she couldn’t get nail polish, and had had to do a lot of work around the house and grounds. But Aine’s hand could go right into the middle of a blazing fire and come out totally unmarked. Sonnia still couldn’t believe that. And she couldn’t believe that her hands would ever be the same.

“I think you’re right,” Sonnia said, almost swallowing the words.

Aine’s arm pressed tighter around Sonnia’s shoulders. Sonnia allowed herself to be drawn toward her, closing her eyes.

“Can I talk to the Council about it?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Sonnia.”

It reminded Sonnia that she should really be the one thanking Aine. Instead, she said, “What if my mother won’t agree to it?”

“Let’s ask her first,” Aine said.

Sonnia looked up as Aine got to her feet. Behind her she could see the wine-colored vigil. It was bright, after all, dark as the color was.

“I’m sorry about the book,” Sonnia said, after she stood up.

“I know,” Aine answered. “Let’s go get some mussels before the tide comes back in.”

In the journal, Sonnia had complained about having to eat seafood all the time when she had never liked it. Aine must have had to read that part to undo it, of course.

But then seafood was all you could get on an island this small, and anyway, it was more than she deserved.

* * * * *

She is having another bad night.

That is what I say to myself. She has good nights and bad nights and this is a bad night. I wish that she was not having a bad night but at least it means that she will talk to me.

“There you are,” she says. “Back again. Tired of outer space?”

She likes to pretend that I travel. It used to be that when she talked to me on her bad nights she would tell me stories about where I had been that day. The stories were all lies but she liked to tell them. I came to like listening, because they seemed to make her happy.

“I have never been to outer space,” I say. “Have you?”

It is a bad night. She is laughing.

A spotted mirror on the wall above her bed. The room is very small. She sits in a chair covered with a smooth brown skin. The skin is split all along the arms and tufts of yellow bulge through the tears. Sometimes flaps of its skin curl up and tear off. The yellow flesh underneath turns brown with dust, in time.

She has turned the chair away from the video box to face the mirror. She likes to look at herself in the mirror while she talks to me. I can see myself in the mirror too, smaller and dimmer than I am. The mirror has not been cleaned in a long time. Nothing in this place has.

“Oh yeah,” she says. One of her hands runs twitching along the pink skin of her shoulder. “All the time.”

She looks at the floor. Her tools are all lying where she left them. She shudders in the chair and the rug slips. I can see that the metal ring of the burner has left a brown ring on the rug.

“How was your day?” she says. She does not look at me. Her eyes are still on the glass pipe with its round chimney, lying next to the unlit burner.

I am not sure at first how to answer.

“What’d you get?” she says, looking at the mirror again. “Where is it?”

She does not care about my day.

“I did not get anything,” I say.

I am looking at her eyes in the mirror when I say it. They are no redder than usual. But I have made her terribly angry. She has to feed and I have brought her nothing.

She may be right to be angry. But I am angry too.

Maybe she can see that, because she laughs.

“Come on,” she says, trying to smile at the mirror. “Come on, Fig, be nice to me. Don’t make me hunt for it. Just tell me where it is. I’ll talk to you after I’m fixed. Come on, Fig, be good.”

Fig is the name she uses for me. I do not think of it as my name.

“I did not get anything,” I say.

I should add that I am sorry. But I am not sure that I am sorry.

She is out of the chair now, hurrying from drawer to cupboard. When she kneels to look under the bed I can see a line of semicircular shadows falling down the back of her neck, spreading out into longer wings in the middle of her back. I do not understand the shadows at first. But she is looking under the bed for a long time. While I watch her something comes back to me from home and I understand.

The shadows are the print of her bones. The bone is inside the flesh but her bones are coming through her skin.

I am sorry now that I did not bring anything.

I want to go out and look for something for her. But it is already dark. It is too late.

“Thurk it!” She is trembling all over. She runs into the bathroom and begins to empty the cabinet above the hard white sink. “Where is it, where the thurking hell have you hidden it?”

I have never tried to hide what I bring her. At first I left it out on the table by the bed under the light. She did not like that. I do not know why. It would bother her to see it. She would not take it until she had taken what she had brought for herself. Then I thought of putting it in a drawer, out of sight. She liked that better. But if I put it in the same place too often it would begin to bother her again. So I began putting it in a different place every time. I never thought of it as hiding. She always found it right away.

It does not take her very long to look everywhere.

Her knees bend and soon she is sitting on the hard floor of the bathroom. Her head rests against the doors of the cupboard under the sink. I can see more bone, white along the ridges of her shins, white lines connecting her shoulders to her neck.

Water is coming from her eyes, and she is making that sound I can never stand to hear.

“Please,” she says. Her eyes are closed and her face is turning red. “Please, please, get me some. Please. Please, Fig, for me. I’ll pay you back.”

She often talks about paying me back. I do not know how she plans to do it. I do not think she does either.

“I cannot,” I say, and the air my words ride on is troubled. “It is dark, I cannot go out now.”

Her eyes open. I look at them and I am frightened.

“Thurk you!” Droplets of water fly off the corners of her mouth. They flicker in the bleached light of the bathroom but go out. “I don’t ask for much!”

I look at her red, twisted face and I think, that is true, but it is also a lie.

“Why don’t you have it?” she screams. “Where the hell have you been all day?”

This must be a very bad night.

During the day I am invisible to her. During the day all that she can see are the men who pay her and the men that she pays. It is during the day that I hunt down the men who carry what she needs and take it from them. I have to be careful so that they do not notice me. I cannot take from the same man too often and I can only take a small amount from each man. One day, I was tired, and I took one man’s whole supply. He thought it had been taken from him by another man and they quarreled. One man was killed and the other has gone for Redemption. I do not want to make that happen again.

I cannot answer her second question. I do not want her to know.

“I did not have time,” I said. “I am sorry.”

But at the same time I am not sorry.

I have been with her almost since I came to the city and I have been bringing her stuff for most of that time. The men who carry it call it glass but she calls it stuff and so that is the word I use. The men that pay her feed me. I try to feed her. It was never perfect but it used to work.

Now, I can see the white bone shining through the skin of her clenched hands.

I have been bringing her what she needs but all the same it is not feeding her.

I do not know what would feed her. I have brought other things but she does not seem to want them.

I do not know if she knows what I am thinking. She lies on the floor with her head on the tiles and her eyes shut. She cannot see me now. She is traveling.

The cupboard above the sink is open. Things have fallen out of it, or been thrown. They lie on the sink, in the sink, on the floor around her curled-up body. They are familiar; sticks and pots and brushes, the paints she puts on every morning. She has said to me, on nights when it is bad enough for her to talk to me but not as bad as this, that without the paint she feels naked. I know that what she really means is that she feels invisible. She believes that people can only see her painted face.

I look at her trembling arms and think that I may be the only one in the world who can see her without the paint.

I begin to pick up the things that have fallen down around her.

She must know that I am there. She must hear me kicking the things aside as I move around her, and the clicking sounds as they fit into their places on the glass shelves. But she does not open her eyes. She does not want to see me.

She is having a very, very bad night.

I go back to the chair with its splitting brown skin and sit in it.

Even if she would talk to me I could not tell her where I had been. She would be angry. I am supposed to be taking care of her.

I look at her and try to see her as I did before. I cannot. The knowledge sits hot inside me like a bullet. It has been a long time since she could take care of me. Now I know that I can no longer take care of her.

From the chair I can see the videobox. It is dark. I am afraid to waken it because it would bother her. She is still on the floor, and her eyes are still closed, and she is talking, but not to me.

“Come on…come on, Melana, come on…you’ll live…you’ll live…”

Melana is the name she uses for herself. It is something that the men who pay her never call her. It is the name that goes with her unpainted face. It may be that I am the only one left who knows it.

She cannot take care of me. I cannot take care of her. But I cannot help trying.

I wish that I could turn on the video box. I might see the pictures again. I have seen them several times now. I watch hoping that I will learn more but nobody in the box will ask the right questions. I only know a few things.

I know that the girl in the library is called Daphie Nileton.

I know that the girl she tried to save is called Kerin Wandleford.

I know that everyone in the box is surprised by many things that do not surprise me at all.

I know that the box will never answer my questions, any more than Melana ever does.

I know that the place where it happened is called Decalon Secondary School.

I know that I have to go there, again.